


Reset From Factory Conditions

by unintelligiblescreaming



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Character Study, Deal-With-It Fic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Canon, Post-Finale, but not all angst!, miranda is not a nice person but she is a person, miranda wants to know how to uninstall emotions, she tries to figure out where pryce ends and miranda begins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-03-29 18:48:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13933086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unintelligiblescreaming/pseuds/unintelligiblescreaming
Summary: Miranda watchesStar Wars, fixes a microwave, makes a friend, and wonders what makes a person into a monster and a monster into a person.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> is there a reason i'm taking time away from my longfic to try and figure out who miranda pryce is after the finale? not a good one, anyway.
> 
> this will update again in a few days, since i already have the next chapter written. there will be at least two more chapters.

Six months ago, Miranda was—as Doug puts it—“one half of an ultra-evil supervillian duo hell-bent on taking over the universe.” Now she’s trying to figure out how a microwave works.  
  
She glares at the button that says “time cook.” What does that mean? Surely all operations on this device require some time to complete? Otherwise it would violate the laws of time and space. She knows what a microwave is and what it does and that it’s a common household appliance, so it’s intensely frustrating to not know which button to press to warm up the drink that she made and forgot about because she was so wrapped up in the book she was reading.  
  
She’s aware that she could simply ask Hera, but the mere thought of asking for help with something so small sends a jolt of humiliation through her chest. It’s silly, to worry about something like this considering the crew of the Hephaestus have been gently directing her through her new life since Miranda woke up as Miranda instead of Pryce, and she _knows_ it’s silly, but it doesn’t stop the searing twist of resentment and frustration that she feels whenever she asks for help.  
  
Maybe that’s normal; maybe everyone feels like this. It probably isn’t, though. Pryce did not think and feel the way a person is supposed to, and Miranda is made of all the same basic building blocks as Pryce, so it’s likely that Miranda does not think and feel the way a person is supposed to either.  
  
Through trial and error, Miranda finds the correct setting and heats the cup so it’s a pleasant temperature to drink. She makes sure to drink it there in the kitchen, because she’s sure that if she takes it back to the chair by the window where she’s been reading she’ll only forget about it again. She has realized that she is the kind of person who forgets about small details like hot drinks when she’s concentrating.  
  
She doesn’t know anything about herself other than what the others have told her, so it’s been a bit of a surprise, these past few months, to notice things about herself that she didn’t know already. Like becoming better acquainted with a stranger, except the stranger lives in the same body, lives in the same place in the dark behind her eyes.  
  
She finishes her drink, savoring the warmth, and sets it in the sink next to the pile of dirty dishes. The dishes have been there since two days ago, because Doug is a procrastinator who treats household chores as things that happen to other people, Miranda is too busy devouring every piece of information she can find on the Internet and in print to think about things like cleaning, and Hera doesn’t have hands. Miranda hypothesizes based on past data that the dishes won’t be dealt with until Renée comes over and gets that pinched expression that means Something Is About To Be Put In Order and woe betide anyone who stands in Renée’s way.  
  
As Miranda leaves the kitchen, she sees Doug wandering into the living room, sleep-mussed hair sticking out in all directions. “Hey,” he says, and yawns.  
  
“You’re up early,” she notes.  
  
He meanders over to the counter and grabs a packet of instant coffee. “I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. That ever happen to you?”  
  
Ah. Well.

Sometimes she wakes up in the night and feels like there is something under her skin that is screaming to be let free, something terrible and unnatural, and her heart will pound in fear no matter how hard she tells herself she’s being ridiculous. So she walks down the hall to the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror. In the sallow glow of the flickering bulb, she examines her left eye, wide and dark and glittering with dim reflected light, human and vulnerable.

Then she looks at her right eye, the cold metal and synthetic tissue that whirs faintly whenever she narrows in on something new, and thinks _I made this, I tore out part of myself and replaced it with something made by my own hand. If Pryce could change herself just like that, then so can I. I can make myself anew._ But the question is—who does she want to be?  
  
“It happens to me all the time,” she says. “Not the dreaming, exactly. More just… thinking. That’s why my sleep schedule is so irregular. I keep wondering what parts of me are the same and what parts are new and how can I tell which is which.”  
  
Doug flashes an understanding smile. “Sucked in by the ol’ self-reflective philosophical musings quicksand, huh? Yeah, I’m pretty familiar with that one myself.”  
  
It’s a small gesture, but it’s enough to make her the shoulders relax a little. It’s nice to be around someone who understands this process of reacquainting herself with herself.

If it were Renée or Isabel here in his place, she would say nothing. They’ve been kind and generous and friendly but every now and then Miranda will Do Something and the two of them will stare at her like she might turn into a monster and attack them if they look away, and Miranda can never tell what will set them off. She certainly wouldn’t open up in Dominik’s presence. She might be more inclined to reveal something like this if it were Daniel, because when Daniel stares it’s with more curiosity than concern, and from what Daniel has mentioned of his past he’s more than accustomed to dealing with people whose moral compasses don’t work quite right.  
  
( _Hera_ is here, of course—she has cameras and microphones and motion sensors in both this house and the house across the street where the other three of them live—but that’s unavoidable, and in any case Hera probably has a right to know.)  
  
But Doug is… she is _almost_ sure that Doug is her friend. “Friend” is a difficult word, hard to pin down, but she thinks it applies here.  
  
The others aren’t friends, she doesn’t think. They’re more like awkward cousins who drop by twice a week to ask if Miranda’s read anything interesting lately and “incidentally you haven’t gone on a murder spree anytime in the past few days, have you? Are you sure? Okay, just checking, haha,” as Daniel once phrased it. (She’s learned that Daniel’s method for coping with awkward conversations is to openly reference the elephant in the room and act oblivious to the horrified glances from everyone else.)  
  
Miranda and Doug chat for a bit, then drift into silence. It’s comfortable. She’s learned she prefers being alone, but when the two of them do their own thing nearby but without talking, it’s like being alone, but—warmer. It's hard to explain. She tried to ask Hera about it, once, if that was a normal feeling, and Hera was confused. _"You just don't like being alone all the time. That's completely normal,"_ Hera said, and Miranda knew in a sudden, inexplicable way that it may be normal for most people but it was not normal for Miranda Pryce.  
  
  
  


  
She hears the door open, and hears Hera say brightly, _“Hi, Doug!”_  
  
“Hi, Hera,” he says. There’s the sound of shoes being shuffled off, groceries being placed on the dining table, then the creaking of the floorboards as footsteps move closer. “Hi, Miranda. How a—what are you _doing?”_  
  
She’s concentrating, so it takes her several seconds to process that (1) someone is speaking, (2) they are speaking to her, (3) that person is Doug, (4) Doug is asking a question, (5) questions generally prompt responses, and (6) the question she was asked was “what are you doing?” She blinks and looks up from the pile of electronic parts spread out on the kitchen tiles. “What? Oh. I’m fixing the microwave.”  
  
Doug surveys the mess that has colonized most of the floor. “Was it broken?”  
  
_“No,”_ says Hera, at the same time that Miranda says, “For a given value of ‘broken’.”  
  
“And that means…”  
  
“The settings’ functionality don’t really match what we tend to use it for. The popcorn setting, for example, is either broken entirely or doesn’t work well with the popcorn brands we purchase. So I’m fixing it. It shouldn’t take long.”  
  
Then again, she also told herself that an hour… no, wait, several hours ago. She’s not actually sure how much time has passed. It is now mildly hazardous to walk through the kitchen, which may present a problem in the near future if they expect to use the kitchen to make food, but Miranda is confident that she can have this finished in time for her next meal. Probably.  
  
_“It’s been five hours,”_ says Hera. _“You haven’t drunk or eaten anything. I’ve been researching the negative effects of bad posture on human spinal structures and the results are not pretty.”_  
  
She feels a spike of annoyance. “It’s fine,” she bites off. “I’m almost done. Now that I’ve given myself a crash course in how to solder a circuitboard—muscle memory, I suspect—all I need is the coding components, and Hera, you have the equivalent of several PhDs in computer science so I doubt that will be difficult.”  
  
_“I don’t want to help with your science project! The microwave is fine!”_ Hera bursts out. There’s an undercurrent of distress below her words. _“You don’t need to_ fix _things that aren’t broken, it’s fine, you have to learn to—_ deal _with things that aren’t exactly how you want them all the time, it’s—”_  
  
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Doug, alarmed. “Let’s, uh, not let this escalate. Let’s compromise. Miranda, you can keep going on this project, we’ll just take a brief pause for dinner. Hera, we’ll get takeout tonight from that Chinese place that Dominik mentioned and set this aside for a short while. Also, Miranda, could you maybe put down the soldering iron? You’re holding it kind of threateningly.”  
  
Miranda gives him a stern look, to make sure he knows that the slight condescension in his voice has not gone unnoticed, and then slowly puts down the soldering iron. She’s trying not to think about what Hera just said, or about whether or not there’s a non-awkward way to tell her non-corporeal roommate that she has no intention of experimenting on her.

(Even if she doesn’t want to admit it, but she is intensely curious about what an AI’s mind looks like when it's deconstructed into its constituent parts.)  
  
She says, “Takeout is acceptable. I’ll get back to work.”  
  
“Oooorrr,” Doug says, drawing it out, “you could do the thing you promised to do this time last week.”  
  
She raises an eyebrow.  
  
“ _Star Wars_ , remember?” he says. “You agreed to watch the first movie in the original trilogy with me. Since Isabel won’t leave me alone until I can say I’ve watched it. Come on, you can’t leave me hanging.”  
  
She’s tempted to reject the suggestion outright, since the problem of the microwave is tapping incessantly against her thoughts and won’t go away until she’s dealt with it. But now that she’s drawn out of her concentration she notices the ache in her back and the hunger growling in her stomach, and a break for the evening sounds tempting. “Fine,” she says grudgingly. “Takeout, and then _Star Wars_ , and then the microwave.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls scream at me about these characters at sybil-ramkin.tumblr.com


	2. Chapter 2

“What?!” Miranda shrieks.  
  
Doug stares open-mouthed at the screen. “I… I have no words.”  
  
_“I_ have words. I have _so_ many words, you would not believe the sheer quantity of words that I have to say right now.”  
  
“I’m dying. I am actually dead. The fact that I look like I”m speaking now? Optical illusion. That ending killed me.”  
  
Muffled, staticky laughter comes over the speakers.  
  
“Don’t you start, Hera,” warns Miranda. “Not after you spent the entirety of the past two weeks giggling at me for enjoying the first movie in this franchise.”  
  
_“I couldn’t help it!”_ says Hera. “ _You kept pursing your lips and acting all skeptical at the concept of a_ Star Wars _marathon, and then once you saw_ A New Hope _you didn’t talk about anything else for the next thirty-three hours. It was hilarious.”_  
  
“That is a gross exaggeration. It was not thirty-three hours,” Miranda says with all the dignity she can muster. “I spoke about other topics during that time.” Then she frowns, reconsidering. “I… I think.” Those two days did feel like a haze occupied primarily with awe at the filmmaking genius of the person who made those films. (She doesn’t know that person’s name because when she tried to Google it she found the Internet mysteriously unavailable. _“Sorry,”_ she recalls Hera saying smugly, _“the risk of spoilers is simply too high. You’ll thank me later.”_  
  
As much as she hates to admit it, Hera may have been right. The end of _Empire Strikes Back_ was… well. “Shell-shocking” didn’t even begin to describe it.  
  
“We need to call Isabel,” Miranda announces.  
  
“Absolutely,” says Doug. “Please, Hera?”  
  
_“Mm… I dunno, maybe it would be better to let you stew in contemplation for a while. Like a marinade.”_  
  
_“Hera!”_ they both shout.  
  
An electronic snort. _“Alright, alright, hold your horses. Calling Isabel now. I’ll do you a favor and skip the ringtone.”_ A clicking sound, and then, _“Captain? Can I have your attention for a moment?”_  
  
Shuffling sounds came over the speakers installed around the living room. A yawn, and then Isabel’s voice said, _“What’s up, Hera?”_  
  
_“Doug and Miranda have something to say.”_  
  
“Scream,” corrects Doug. “This more of an incoherent screaming moment.”  
  
_“Uh,”_ says Lovelace.  
  
Miranda takes a deep breath. Calm. Calm. She knows how to be calm. Especially in relation to fictional characters. Then she gives up and exclaims, _“Darth Vader is Luke’s father?!”_  
  
Isabel laughs at them, because she is terrible. _“Ha! Told you so.”_  
  
“You did not tell us ‘so’,” says Doug. “You said ‘did you know that Vader is Luke’s—’ and then Renée shoved three napkins into your mouth. And then Daniel and Dominik got into an argument about Jar Jar Binks, whoever that is.”  
  
_“Jar Jar Binks is an abomination in the eyes of sentient creatures everywhere,_ ” says Hera brightly. _“But you haven’t watched that movie yet, so I am obligated by the sacred rules of ‘no spoilers’ to say no more.”_  
  
  
  
  
“Hera,” says Miranda, in a numb exhausted haze after yet another sleepless night. “Tell me how to reinstall a circadian rhythm.”  
  
_“You left out the magic word,”_ says Hera, tone a weird mix between confused and teasing and vaguely offended.  
  
“Please tell me how to reinstall a circadian rhythm.”  
  
_“Um. You can’t? You could take drugs, I suppose. Renée takes melatonin to get to sleep on time sometimes, but then you would run the risk of ending up like Daniel, whose body has adjusted and is now immune to lower dosages.”_  
  
“It should be easier than that, though,” says Miranda disapprovingly. “I just have to, what, wait and hope my body adjusts? It’s ridiculous. This whole arrangement is highly disorganized. I wish I could exist as a consciousness without a corporeal form, like you.”  
  
_“You know, you’re actually the first person who’s ever said that to me?”_  
  
“How odd. It seems like the obvious thought.” She twists so her cheek is lying on a different, cooler segment of the couch and kicks at the blanket over her legs. She relocated to the couch after she became too restless in her bed, but the restlessness keeps bugging her regardless. It’s a good thing that Hera’s position as the only AI on the planet without collar programs restricting her access the Internet means that she can provide the survivors of the Hephaestus with a more or less endless supply of illegally transferred money, because Miranda can’t imagine she could survive a 9 to 5 job with her dysfunctional sleep schedule.  
  
The other reason it would be hard for Miranda to get a job, even one that requires no experience, is her cybernetic eye. She’s learned the hard way to wear an eyepatch when she goes outside. She knows people find it grotesque, but she can’t really relate. She just doesn’t feel disgust or horror when she looks at it in the mirror—other things, yes, but not that. Maybe it’s another thing that made Pryce who she was: she knows she _should_ feel a certain way about these things, but she doesn’t.  
  
She wishes Pryce hadn’t done all those things, especially to Doug and Isabel and Renée and Daniel and Hera, who are people she likes and wants to be happy, who are the only people in the world who care about Miranda. (For a given value of “care.”) But she doesn’t… hate it.  
  
_“Now that you say it, though,”_ says Hera. _“I do have a body. Just not a human one. My body used to be a space station, and I could feel everything that happened to me the way you might feel something against your skin. Then for a short while my body was the Urania, and I was smaller and sleeker and more… directed, like a bullet moving through air. Now my body is two houses in a neighborhood, with extra eyes and ears that pop up outside whenever I infiltrate a phone or computer that’s outside those places, and I can feel the pull of gravity like… I don’t even know how to talk about it in words you would understand. Sometimes it’s like a hand on my back holding me upright, and sometimes it’s like a ball and chain around my ankle.”_  
  
“In the Hephaestus,” says Miranda. “You had ultraviolet sensors and things that like that, didn’t you? Was it nice, being able to see things humans can’t?”  
  
Now Hera sounds wistful. “It was lovely. It was my favorite part of my job. Except I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, really, because I could say the star’s psi-wave corona was especially beautiful lately but I wouldn’t have any of the right metaphors to describe it.”  
  
“You should try learning to write poetry. I hear describing the indescribable is what poets are all about. I think so, at least... I've never tried it myself.”  
  
_“Maybe, but I doubt I’d be any good at it. I do love poetry, though.”_  
  
“I didn’t know that,” says Miranda. “Do you have a favorite poem?”  
  
_“Yes. But I… there are some bad memories attached to it, now. I don’t know. It’s complicated.”_  
  
Miranda twists again to stare up at the ceiling, turning the stucco into rivers and valleys in her imagination. She remembers the final descent through Earth’s atmosphere, seeing the greens and blues and grays of the world arrayed below her, so magnificent and so delicate, somehow fragile in its vastness. She remembers the piercing jolt of confused protectiveness and worry and longing and love she felt, and she wishes she had the right words to describe it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you want to scream at me on another internet platform you are welcome to talk to me at sybil-ramkin.tumblr.com about pretty much anything


	3. Chapter 3

Chopping onions is harder than it seems. She wouldn’t be attempting to chop anything other than a frozen pizza if it weren’t for the Disapproving Face that Renée gets whenever she realizes Miranda and Doug haven’t home-cooked a meal in two weeks. Part of Miranda instinctively recognizes the Disapproving Face as a challenge, and she is beginning to see a tendency in herself to never let a challenge go unanswered.  
  
So now she’s trying to make a stew. Except her eyes are watery from the onion… juice? fumes? is that the word? the onion stuff, and it’s making her cybernetic eye in particular spasm painfully. But she soldiers on, unwilling to give up. At least until she slips and the knife bites into her palm.  
  
She hisses and doubles over. Her mind is a blossom of pain, but beneath that is frustration, bitter and searing at the back of her throat—why can’t she do this, it’s such a simple task, why is her body so _weak?_  
  
_“Miranda? Are you—?”_ Hera’s cameras whir as they swivel. “ _You’re hurt.”_  
  
“I need,” Miranda says, and stops. She can’t bring herself to say the words.  
  
_“Medical supplies are two cabinets to your left. You’ll need gauze, disinfectants, a few other things—that’s, um, that’s bleeding a lot, isn’t it? I’m calling Renée.”_  
  
“Don’t—”  
  
But there’s already a crackle and then Hera says, slightly echoey, _“Commander? Oh, I forgot she went out shopping. Let’s see, who else is… hey, Jacobi?”_  
  
_“Yeah?”_ answers Daniel’s voice.  
  
_“Can you come across the street and help out with a first aid problem? I don’t trust Doug with this.”_  
  
“I am perfectly capable of handling this on my own,” Miranda says stiffly.  
  
_“You need at least one more hand than you have in order to bandage that properly,”_ says Hera.  
  
Through the phone connection, a door opening and closing is audible. Miranda glances out the window and sees Daniel trudging down the road in sweatpants and a t-shirt that says “Introverts unite! Separately. In your own homes.” The door isn’t locked, and he doesn’t bother ringing the doorbell before sauntering in.  
  
“You shouldn’t be here,” says Miranda. Her hands are slick with her own blood. She hates this hates this _hates this_ and she has no desire to be kind. Her whole world narrows down to a single point and she wants him _gone_ , she wants him to _suffer—_  
  
“Good afternoon to you too,” he says, rolling his eyes. “You’ve really stuck yourself, huh? Lemme see.”  
  
He’s businesslike, mechanical. That’s what makes it tolerable. He staunches the wound, waits until it clots, then disinfects and bandages the cut. Miranda lets it happen, body rigid, caging her tongue with her teeth so she doesn’t say the things that well up in her mouth, though they feel like bile, like they must be spat out or she’ll never be rid of them. She hates him for his nonchalance when faced with the symptoms of her fragility, her form’s tendency to break and yield and run down like a dishwasher used too frequently over the years. She knows it’s irrational, knows that the hatred isn’t something he deserves—that’s why she stops herself from lashing out—but she feels it all the same.  
  
When he’s done, he looks over at the cutting board and the pot that’s bubbling unheeded on the stove. “What are you making?” he asks.  
  
“Stew.”  
  
“What kind of stew?”  
  
“I was led to believe that stew could contain anything that could be boiled.”  
  
“Ouch. I guess asking what kind of flavor profile you were going for is out of the question, then?”  
  
Since their return to Earth, Daniel has binge-watched a disturbingly large number of reality TV cooking shows. “Please,” says Miranda, taking a deep breath. “Go away. Go away quickly.”  
  
“Nah.”  
  
“I am _not_ in the mood for—”  
  
“Too bad. Go browse Twitter or something while I finish making dinner.”  
  
She gapes at him, but he appears to be entirely serious. After a few minutes of struggling for something to say to convince him of how very unwelcome he is, all her energy vanishes in a single whoosh. She finds herself sitting on the couch and unlocking her phone. She must admit that ~~humiliating~~ correcting people who are wrong on the Internet is a deeply cathartic endeavor.  
  
“So where’s Doug?” asks Daniel.  
  
_“Asleep,”_ Hera answers from one of the smaller speakers in the kitchen.  
  
“It’s five-thirty pm,” says Daniel disbelievingly.  
  
“Like your sleep schedule is any better,” Miranda snaps, feeling a spike of protectiveness. “Leave him alone.”  
  
“Okay, okay, yeesh,” says Daniel. Miranda glares at the back of his head, then returns her attention to her phone. Her shoulders are hunched; her entire body is on the defensive. She keeps scrolling through her feed, focusing on the more annoying comments in order to distract herself from the numb throb of pain in her hand.  
  
Soon a warm, delicious smell wafts from the kitchen. Cooking shows or not, she isn’t fully prepared to believe that Daniel knows how to cook until two bowls of stew are sitting between the two of them and her tastebuds reluctantly inform her that this is the best meal to come out of that kitchen in months. “I’m shocked. I wasn’t aware you were capable of actual cooking,” she says. She can’t resist.  
  
“My old commanding officer taught me,” he says lightly.  
  
That shuts up the conversation pretty handily. He’s talking about one of the ones who died. It’s an unspoken rule that they never talk about the ones who died.  
  
The silence is fine with her. It gives her time to discreetly examine his expression and posture, trying to decipher exactly what this little interaction they’re having is supposed to be about. It’s odd. There’s something more at ease about the set of his shoulders; an ease that has never quite been there before when the two of them have spoken one-on-one. It took her a while to recognize the signs of discomfort in him, but then she learned to notice the faint undercurrent of fear, perhaps subconscious, that was beneath all their conversations. Now that’s gone. In its place is a touch of… sadness? Something else?  
  
“You did that before, you know,” he says suddenly, gesturing to her.  
  
“What? Accidentally stab myself with sharp objects?”  
  
“No. Your posture. The way you put your chin in your hand and your elbow in the other, and then look at people like you could take them apart with your mind if you concentrate hard enough.”  
  
She blinks. “Oh,” she says. She wasn’t expecting that. It feels a bit like she’s wandering through a darkened wood and he’s handed her a flashlight. “I. Is that. Bad?”  
  
“Not really. Not good either. It just is.” He shrugs. “Some things are like that.”  
  
She twitches self-consciously, hesitates, then deliberately keeps her arms in that position. It makes her oddly happy, to have something like this, a small habit that is recognizably hers.  
  
Daniel doesn’t miss her little flicker of a smile. “Do you wish you were her?” he asks.  
  
Her smile vanishes.  
  
“I—never mind. It was a stupid question. I know it’s more complicated than that.”  
  
“You _know,_ do you.” And just like that, the resentment returns. She hates when the the others act like they know her better than she knows herself. It’s true, in one way, but it’s not that simple either.  
  
“Yeah, I do know,” he says. “But not because I met you as Dr. Pryce. That thing, back there? Where I patched you up and it was obvious that you wanted to murder me slowly and painfully? Maxwell did that too.”  
  
She stiffens. She wasn’t expecting that, either.  
  
( _Mace Fisher. Sam Lambert. Kuan Hui. Victoire Fourier. Rhea. Isabel Lovelace, the first. Alexander Hilbert. Alana Maxwell. Warren Kepler. Rachel Young. Marcus Cutter._ She knows the names by heart. It’s not guilt, though it probably should be. It’s more that it feels strange to have had such an impact on other people, to have cut their futures out of the world, and not to remember doing it.)  
  
“Let me guess,” says Daniel. “You’re not a fan of your fleshy, fragile, uncomfortably squishy corporeal prison. You wish you could make yourself indestructible, or at least easier to do maintenance on. Or even better, that you could upload yourself to a machine and not worry about breaking down all the time. And you really, really don’t like people seeing you malfunctioning. Especially not people you want to make respect you, which is basically everyone.”  
  
She takes a spoonful of stew and doesn’t answer, which is a confession in and of itself. This is… too many emotions for her right now.  
  
“You’re a lot like Maxwell, kind of,” he says. “Except not.”  
  
“How specific.”  
  
“Ha, ha,” he says flatly. “She was a lot more sure of who she was and who she was going to be, which isn’t exactly surprising. But unlike you, she never got much enjoyment out of having power over other people.”  
  
Her fingers tighten. “I’m not the person I was before.”  
  
(She _wants_ to be, though. It’s a truth she cannot deny, and one she’d never dare reveal. She wants the assured snap of the voice that she heard in the recordings, she wants the iron self-control, she wants to be skilled and confident and capable reforging herself into whatever she needs to be.  
  
But she wants this too. She wants to go on walks to the coastline and turn on her phone camera so she can show Hera everything that’s out there. She wants to go grocery shopping with Dominik. She wants to have group dinners where Isabel and Daniel banter sarcastically and she and Renée trade knowing glances behind their backs. She wants to talk with Doug about movies and what it’s like to be a blank slate of a person.)  
  
“I didn’t say anything about Dr. Pryce,” says Daniel. “I’m talking about you.”  
  
“I don’t like holding power over others. I don’t _have_ power over others.”  
  
He snickers. “I didn’t—that came out more dramatically than I intended. Remember the Dirty Socks Incident of March 12th? Because that’s what I’m thinking of here.”  
  
“Doug left his sweaty clothes all over _my_ floor! It was completely unacceptable! Becoming indignant about that sort of nonsense is a perfectly—”  
  
“I’m not disputing the unacceptableness of Doug’s socks. I’m just saying that every time you get stern with someone and they do what you say, you radiate self-satisfaction like Wolf 359 radiates psi-waves. It’s not, y’know, evil or anything. It’s just kind of funny.” He picks up the empty bowls and takes them to the kitchen.  
  
She calls after him, “I don’t suppose if I got stern with _you…”_  
  
“Not a chance. I’m immune to authority figures.”  
  
“I find that implausible. You live with Renée and Isabel.”  
  
“Why do you think they keep me around? They like a challenge.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> pls scream at me about these characters at sybil-ramkin.tumblr.com


End file.
